WILMINGTON — The U.S. market leader of AstraZeneca told the Wilmington area bioscience community that it’s time to see beyond the turbulence and plan ahead.
Joris Silon, U.S. Country President for AstraZeneca, was one of the keynote speakers at last week’s Delaware’s DNA Conference which was organized by the Delaware Bioscience Association. Hours before he spoke to a crowded room at the Chase Center on the Riverfront, the U.S. struck a trade deal with the United Kingdom on some goods.
In a sign of the times, Silon joked that he would have to make a call to understand what it meant for the company.
“It’s sort of happening in the moment,” Silon told John Crowley, the president and CEO of Biotechnology Innovation Organization, the world’s largest biotechnology advocacy group. “I was checking with my team on [Capitol] Hill to see if we know what’s in there . . . I’ve been more than 25 years in this industry, so it’s not new that we get scrutiny.”
AstraZeneca was one of the first major pharmaceutical companies to arrive in Delaware, arriving with 5,000 employees at the time out of its first North American headquarters in Fairfax. Today, the company employs 2,000 people in Delaware, including at its Newark site where it manufactures, tests and ships medications.
The global pharmaceutical company is in 125 countries and 84,000 employees worldwide with the U.S. market making up 43% of its $54 billion revenue. With the trade war making waves in international trade, trade was the topic on the mind at the conference. Pharmaceuticals are the second-largest import to the U.S., as well as the U.S.’s fourth biggest export to the U.K.
Silon said that there’s always risk and opportunities but added that AstraZeneca’s team tries to scan for arising risks, like tariffs, while working to mitigate them.
“I do think that first, as a leader, what I’m trying to do is focus on what I can influence because you can use so much time and energy, and things that are still speculation can change one day to another,” he said. “You need to understand what’s there. The difficult leadership task for me is where do you really engage and where do you wait and see.”
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John Crowley, the president and CEO of Biotechnology Innovation Organization, talks with AstraZeneca U.S. Country President Joris Silon about the company's mission during the conference at the Chase Riverfront. | DBT PHOTO BY KATIE TABELING[/caption]
Part of the equation is also planning to some degree, and COVID-19 provided a warning about the supply chain for the pharmaceutical industry. AstraZeneca started to open new sites with the idea of locally sourcing and distributing products. In fact, Silon said that most of the medicines the company makes in the U.S. are for U.S. patients.
“Although health care is a global issue, it is a very locally organized ecosystem that takes care of it. Being entrenched in that local ecosystem, from A to Z from discovery to commercialization and manufacturing, we will be in the market. And that’s what we have done in the United States,” he said. “I think we’ll be able to weather this. We have a really well-established manufacturing organization.”
Instead, the remaining questions Silon has is the Trump administration’s “most favored nation” plan to cut some drug prices to match lowered drug prices abroad with select countries and how it will play out with Medicare and Medicaid.
In addition, the AstraZeneca executive also said he was closely watching the $2,000 cap on oncology drugs introduced by the Inflation Reduction Act. Silon pointed to the cap as a cause for many patients starting and continuing medicine, while before they may have ended treatment due to high costs.
It’s also a time for risks, Silon said, explaining that its localized supply chain could be a best example of that as AstraZeneca manufactured 2.5 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses. While that was not approved for use in America, Silon said it taught lessons in how to accelerate clinical trials and manufacturing processes.
Today, AstraZeneca aims to develop therapies in its rare disease unit in Boston, oncology, and cardiovascular and metabolism diseases. AstraZeneca currently spends about $13 billion in research and drug development across the globe, which includes $5 billion in the U.S. With CEO Pascal Soriot’s “moonshot” goal of $80 billion in sales in the next five years, there’s a drive to see what comes next from the pharmaceutical giant.
“We have a philosophy that we push the boundaries of science, and with that comes the fact we need to take risks,” Silon said. Often, when our CEO talks about it, he’s saying, ‘Look, not everything is going to work, because if everything works, we’re probably not pushing the boundaries of science. So that’s an important piece of it.”
Editor's note: This story has been corrected to state that AstraZeneca has invested $5 billion in research and development in the U.S.